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The Future of Left Turn: We have some major news about the future of Left Turn. We have published the final issue of our print publication. This decision did not come easily, but in the end we felt we had no choice. This is not, however, the end of Left Turn...Read more

It has been well over a decade since welfare was a major political issue, regularly debated in public policy arenas and the media—and used as a wedge issue by Democrats and Republicans alike. But with an organized white mob movement called the Tea Party, who cloak a project of reasserting white national/global authority underneath a call for states’ rights and fiscal prudence, and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act coming up for re-authorization this year, we are bound to hear more rhetoric about welfare's validity and the need to forcibly compel more Black women into “appropriate” and “responsible” work, sexual, and reproductive behaviors.

On May 7, 2011, the Breakthrough Mamas, a grassroots collective of poor/single/disabled/ (im)migrant/teen mamas of color, led a Mother’s Day Liberation Rally in coalition with other activist mamas and allies in the Committee for Single Mothers on the Move. The rally brought together a wide range of political struggles in Vancouver, British Columbia—around housing, health, living wages, transportation, childcare, status, legal support, education, and cultural integrity. It also provided a platform to demand freedom from violence against women, sexual/reproductive self-determination, and gender liberation for all peoples.

No one could say they'd seen it before. That’s what was so genuinely exhilarating about those first weeks of protests in Madison against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s effort to take away public workers’ right to collectively bargain. People had seen protest, confrontation, and direct action before, but now these were taking shape and combining in ways no one had ever expected. Rallies wouldn’t let up—protestors wouldn’t go home and more returned every day. An open-ended, intense confrontation between the people and the government grew day by day in the State Capitol.

Even though weeks have passed since the US raid which killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, details surrounding his death remain murky. The most curious question remains how was he able to “hide” in Abbottabad, a militarized garrison town, eluding Pakistani and US intelligence for so long.

Apparently, the raid entailed US forces entering bin Laden’s compound, half a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, and shooting him in the head and chest. The fact that the US altered its initial claim that bin Laden was killed in a fierce firefight to admitting that the Al Qaeda leader was unarmed tends to challenge the jingoistic superman narrative used to describe the assassination.

Notes from the Global Intifada – Believe it or not, over the past year we at Left Turn had been discussing changing our tag line, it is as though a long time can go by without fundamental change happening, and then all of a sudden there is a week when everything takes off.

Ten years ago when Left Turn emerged, momentum seemed to be on our side. In 1999 historic protests shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. A wave of anti-corporate globalization protests that had begun building in the movements of the Global South seemed to sweep into North America and finally caught the people of the US. A project that could document and project this global rebellion for a specifically US audience seemed necessary and full of possibilities.